The US seems to be having a hard time admitting it bombed a hospital in Afghanistan

Commander of US operations in Afghanistan, General John Campbell, testified to a Senate committee on Monday that the US airstrike on Saturday that hit a Medecins sans Frontières (MSF) hospital was targeted "accidentally".

We have now learned that on October 3, Afghan forces advised that they were taking fire from enemy positions and asked for air support from US forces.

An airstrike was then called to eliminate the Taliban threat, and several innocent civilians were accidentally struck.

It took three days for the US to confirm that it had carried out the attack in Kunduz in northern Afghanistan, in which 12 members of staff and ten patients, including three children, were killed.

The region has recently fallen under Taliban control again, and the US is in the process of trying to drive the terror group out.

Several commentators have been quick to point out the hypocrisy of the US in warning that Russian intervention in Syria will lead to civilian casualties the day before the hospital was bombed.

And to make matters worse, US forces have been accused of changing their version of events which led to the deadly strike:

Many still don't believe the strike was accidental, since the story keeps changing, and the New York Times reports Afghan officials are satisfied because several senior Taliban were killed.

MSF has called the attack a "war crime", and demanded an independent investigation into the incident.

Although the official line has changed somewhat, MSF and international media have been clear in reporting that the strike was carried out by the US.

But you still wouldn't necessarily know that from several US news outlets, who seem to have been deliberately fudging the fact that the US was to blame.

Glenn Greenwald of The Intercept has been leading the criticisms of headlines which avoid naming active agents and direct responsibility.

Speaking to the Huffington Post on Monday, Greenwald said:

What it shows is that so many US media outlets... have as their predominant attribute when they do journalism not truth-telling, not objectivity, as they claim, but jingoism, this kind of uber-nationalism, this allegiance to their own government.

...The reporting from The New York Times has been so atrocious that if you’re a New York Times reader relying exclusively on that paper, you would literally have no idea that the United States is actually the country that perpetrated this attack.

MSF now says it is pulling its staff out of Kunduz, which will leave the city and neighbouring provinces with scant access to medical care.

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